While AMC gets ready for a new season of “Mad Men” and TNT presents new seasons of “The Closer” and “Saving Grace,” NBC presents “Celebrity Circus” and CBS offers you the sleazy “Swingtown” and the woeful Canadian cop series “Flashpoint.”

CBS and NBC are the two oldest TV networks and once enjoyed positions of supreme leadership in TV.

But they still haven’t come to grips with the idea that putting their best feet forward would probably be a good idea in the summertime if they wish to prevent an increasing number of viewers from discovering that the shows on cable TV can be just as good as, or better than, the shows that were once the networks’ exclusive property.

But alas, the networks have decided that summer is the time for cheap reality shows or scripted shows that weren’t quite good enough to be aired during the regular season.

Nowadays, with lineups heavy with reality shows, the biggest players in the industry look like cable networks such as A&E, History Channel or Bravo, which, generally speaking, have reality shows that are better than the ones on the bigger networks.

The summertime really brings home the idea that, when it comes to leadership, the big networks are as dead as dinosaurs.

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When is breaking news not news at all? When it is news “reported” by a mortgage company in commercials styled like emergency-news broadcasts.

We’ve complained about this many times over the years: TV stations choosing to make quick bucks from hucksterish advertisers, even when the commercials the stations are accepting threaten to destroy the stations’ credibility in news.

The latest fake newscast is the one airing all over the place these days from an outfit called Topdot Mortgage. In the commercials, a breathless “anchorwoman” appears on screen to “report” on opportunities for obtaining fast mortgages. The fake newscasts even come complete with “crawls” at the bottom of your screen, just like the ones on CNN or Fox News, that ballyhoo “breaking news” about interest rates and the like.

I have no idea if this Topdot firm is reputable or not, but the company’s “newscast” is as phony as a three-dollar bill. Stations that wish their viewers to trust them when real news occurs should adopt policies against airing such things.